It’s been months of uncertainty for the hundreds of former customers of Menomonee Falls-based
Window Select. Even before the home improvement company, which provided customers with windows, siding and doors, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy
in February, customers had been complaining for months of incomplete and improperly finished work.
Now, a newly formed West Allis home improvement company is moving forward with fulfilling a sizable chunk of Window Select’s outstanding contracts.
TruVista was formed in January and is backed by a group of shareholders with experience in the management consulting business. Spearheading the company’s efforts is
Mohit Shah, president of TruVista. He’s an entrepreneur who’s most recently served as a senior project director for the management consulting firm
Cogent Analytics, the firm leading Window Select through its bankruptcy proceedings.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve built and scaled several businesses in a high-intensity environment, so it seemed like a good fit,” said Shah.
He’s also no stranger to contractor fraud. He and his family were victims of a scam that occurred at their Mequon home when he was a child.
“We were putting an addition on the house. It was coming up on winter and the contractor opened up the entire side of our house, took my dad’s money and ran off,” said Shah.
He began his career as a renewable energy developer in 2007, which is when he founded his first business, NGSolar. Shah ended up selling NGSolar and its eventual portfolio companies in 2011. From there, he launched an ed-tech company called Yaphie. The startup offers a platform that helps high school students prepare and apply to colleges. Shah owns the intellectual property for the software but is in talks with a D.C.-based software company that would like to purchase it.
Following his time launching NGSolar and Yaphie, Shah moved to India in 2015 and formed a research and development/management consulting company called Emanar Enterprise.
“I did commercial development, residential construction…I’ve done projects for cities whether it be retrofitting an entire city with LED lights or retrofitting schools with energy efficient applications,” he said.
He once again built up that business into a larger portfolio of companies and ended up selling it. In 2022, he was recruited by Cogent Analytics. Discussions on taking over Window Select's unfulfilled contracts began last year.
During the bankruptcy process, the remaining contracts were broken down into three buckets: those that were profitable endeavors, those that would break even and those that would come at a loss.
“I wasn’t looking to cherry-pick (what contracts I wanted). For me, it was saying whoever wants to move forward, I’ll take all the work. I don’t think anyone else did that,” said Shah.
From February through April, TruVista contacted all 1,700 customers who still had open Window Select contracts. From there, approximately 600 wanted to move forward with TruVista.
TruVista is currently working through the process of “re-measuring” homes for each project and confirming and ordering materials.
Before an installation can be completed, each project must go through the re-measuring process. Since June, when TruVista was officially awarded the remaining contracts, 20 installations have been completed. Shah said that number will exponentially increase as the company works toward the end of the list of homes that need to be re-measured. He expects all 600 contracts to be fulfilled next spring.
“I think I’ve turned the narrative in (customers’) minds,” said Shah. “I think I’ve created the expectation that they know I can manage and deliver on. It’s been a challenge, but there’s a method to the madness.”
Once the remaining Window Select contracts have been handled, Shah wants to continue developing TruVista into an end-to-end exterior home improvement company. He believes the company can grow to bring in $20 million to $25 million annually within the next three to five years.
“There aren’t very many contractors in the state of Wisconsin that are going to perform 600 jobs in this calendar year,” he said. “I think that opportunity could drive organic growth for us in a way that very few competitors might have experienced.”
